Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
When the right piece of work finally has you, you are entirely there. Hours go, nothing intrudes, and the difficulty that flattens you elsewhere is nowhere in the room.
That state is the same machinery as the hyperfocus that gets you into trouble, pointed at something worth doing. Worth noticing so you can go looking for the conditions that produce it: which kind of task, what time of day, how much noise, whether anyone else is around. It is also worth telling the people who live with you, because from outside it looks like being ignored, and it usually is not.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We softened iron for him (Quran 34:10). Hard material yielding in the right hands is a good picture of what it feels like when you finally find your own work.
۞وَلَقَدۡ ءَاتَيۡنَا دَاوُۥدَ مِنَّا فَضۡلࣰ اۖ يَٰجِبَالُ أَوِّبِي مَعَهُۥ وَٱلطَّيۡرَۖ وَأَلَنَّا لَهُ ٱلۡحَدِيدَ
We graced David with Our favour. We said, ‘You mountains, echo God’s praises together with him, and you birds, too.’ We softened iron for him
Qur’an 34:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Three individual differences studies set two accounts of creative idea generation against each other, one where tight focused control does the work and one where unfocused spontaneous thought does. The two predict opposite things, which is why testing them is informative. It is laboratory work on idea generation rather than on absorption in a task, so it tells you the question is live, not that your best hours have been explained.
Smeekens BA, Kane MJ. (2016). Working Memory Capacity, Mind Wandering, and Creative Cognition: An Individual-Differences Investigation into the Benefits of Controlled Versus Spontaneous Thought.. Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
When the activity itself is interesting enough, attention arrives on its own rather than being forced.
When not to
Hours that vanish are a mixed blessing, so it helps to have something outside you marking the end of them, particularly if children, prayers or meals are waiting.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Some of the low, grey stretches are not depression. They are what happens when there has been nothing on the go for a while, and the colour comes back when a project starts.
One psychiatrist took up a dance class in lockdown, three times a week, at something he was frankly not good at. Being bad at it was the reason it kept working.
A relationship with no friction in it can leave an ADHD partner restless rather than content. A bit of heat is not the same as a bad marriage. What matters is what happens afterwards.